Drury summer program pushes and supports artists

Student Alison Simmons works on a painting.

Tom Parker encourages people to explore their imaginations and creative capabilities every summer. Parker is emeritus professor of art and art history at Drury, an established artist, and the program director of the master of arts in studio art and theory, or MART.

Beginning its sixth year, MART is a 30-credit-hour graduate degree taught only in the summer. Faculty and artists of diverse backgrounds come from across the nation to teach students and push their imaginations.

The program is open to anyone with an undergraduate degree who is focused on bringing art to life. Some students enter without any art background and leave with exceptional portfolio pieces.

"It is all about drive and desire to learn," said Parker. "We don't differentiate between experiences and knowledge. Students are becoming artists, often for the first time."

Those who complete the program, which takes three summers, are able to launch into professional artistic careers or use their degrees and portfolio pieces to enter master of fine arts programs.

"Having the master's degree will afford me a higher salary as a teacher," said Mary Resz Weston, a 2012 MART graduate. "But more importantly, having the experience and knowledge gained from the MART program will make me a more thoughtful, skilled and capable artist for the rest of my life."

Parker says that Drury's program is the only one of its kind in the Midwest. When developing it, Parker met with an advisory council of faculty from the best fine arts graduate schools in the nation.

It's the collaboration within the program that can prove most valuable.

"I wasn't even sure how to do much of the physical, structural work that was required to make some of my sculptures happen," said Resz Weston. "But any time I got stuck, I had three or four teachers near that knew exactly how to make my ideas work."

At the end of each two-month summer session, students' work is showcased at Drury's Pool Art Center.

"When students finish, they have pushed themselves to think beyond ideas floating in their heads," Parker said. "They give ideas a reason to belong to the world. They give ideas life."